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The Earliest Talk About The GTK4 Tool-Kit

Phoronix: The Earliest Talk About The GTK4 Tool-Kit

Besides talk of KDE on Wayland, also talked about this weekend in Berlin at the 2011 Desktop Summit was the GTK4 tool-kit. While GTK3 was just released with GNOME 3.0, the most primitive discussions surrounding the next-generation GTK4 tool-kit were had this morning at Humboldt University...

Depending on where we are we can't always be running our favourite desktop (GNOME). It sure would be nice to at least use our favourite apps regardless of the desktop. A few already are...GIMP, I think Evolution is, Evince sort of works last I tried. Ones missing are Rhythmbox, Totem, Shotwell, GEdit, etc.

Can you state a reason why it should be, especially in context of how Win32 support is lagging and has always been a second-class citizen? Azure is designed around Mozilla's needs to supply a nice experience on Direct2D+3D, not what GTK typically wants to do. A stateless API like Azure is useful for an HTML renderer where there is a lot of application-specific state, but is not necessarily so useful for a widget toolkit that has no additional drawing abstraction. The only benchmarks I've seen comparing the two were explicitly for the D2D backend, and Cairo's poor performance there may just be because its D2D backend is immature.

Cairo is a very nice API. If it does have performance issues, those can almost certainly be fixed internally rather than requiring developers to port their apps to another API. Firefox apparently needed a different API (note that "different" is not synonymous with "better") because it has very specific needs due its reliance on higher-level drawing APIs.